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Will the Next Generation of Video Game Consoles be the Last?

Random Speculation

Let me preface this by saying that I’ve never been super accurate at predicting the future, but I’ve always enjoyed trying to none the less. Random, unexpected events seem to conspire to keep the future of video gaming and technology in general an abstruse topic.

When this generation of console games began, the leap in terms of graphical fidelity from the previous systems was fairly substantial. The 360 and PS3 were both very powerful systems in terms of their tech for the time, and both brought significant features that changed and shaped the market over the next few years.

In particular they both had large hard drives (well... except for the 360 Arcade SKU) and online functionality. While those weren’t completely unprecedented features for game consoles, this was really the first time that such features were really exploited to their fullest extent.

Playing games online has became pretty standard for console gamers, an experience that up until this generation was really relegated to PC gamers. It was also easier than ever to update and expand existing games as well as the hardware itself with firmware updates and expansion packs for games. And digital distribution of games gradually became more prevalent, at first with smaller arcadey games, indie games, and older console games and eventually more substantial games. Players could keep friends lists with gamer tags and chat in game with headsets. Netflix eventually made it’s way onto all three systems. In short, video game consoles were becoming more like PCs.

Meanwhile an interesting thing was happening in the more general tech world, the ascendancy of the smart device. First, the smartphone market exploded with the launch of the iPhone, followed a few years later by the various Android phones. Then came the iPad, which in turn spurred on a slew of Android tablet devices.

The social media sites Facebook and Twitter became global phenomenon during this time period as well, something that fed back nicely into the emergent smart device market, giving people convenient new ways to post to those sites as well as another reason to own the devices themselves. People were also doing something else a great deal with these new toys: gaming.

Gaming on smart phones has had the unfortunate effect of putting the hurt on the portable video game system market. Speculating on how all this might play out is a good topic for another blog post though.

These incredible little gadgets are becoming more and more powerful and will eventually eclipse the current generation of video game systems in terms of their processing power. Though to this day the 360 and PS3 are capable of producing some very impressive graphics, it must be remembered that they are based on tech that is now well over half a decade old, a virtual eternity in the world of nanolithography, microprocessor fabrication, and Moore’s Law. In that world, smaller is better. Shrinking things allows you to cram more stuff in the same space, to use less power, and/or run things at faster clock speeds while generating less heat. And since 2005-2006 there have been several shrinkages.

When the 360 and PS3 launched, their CPUs and GPUs were manufactured on 90 nanometer processes. Now, in mid 2011, Intel is producing CPUs for retail that are 32nm and they plan on producing 22nm chips before years end. IBM, AMD, Nvidia, and the various ARM chip manufacturers are also on track to 32nm.

To put things in perspective, the ATI (AMD) Xenos graphics chip that was designed back in 2005 for the XBox 360 has 48 “stream processors”. Today, the top of the line PC graphics cards produced by AMD have 1120 stream processors. Even their budget cards have far more processing power than the venerable 360s.

So why don’t today’s PC games look lightyears better than current console games do? Because console games have been the determining force in video game development for several years now. Due to skyrocketing development costs it has become prohibitively expensive to exclusively create games for PCs that fully exploit this potential. Generally the overwhelming majority of big budget games that end up on PCs these days were developed for consoles first, and game consoles have become the lowest common denominator for graphics.

Also, some of the very things that were staples of the PC gaming industry, online gaming, harddrives, and voice chat, were brought to consoles and to a much wider audience. Over the course of this generation of game consoles many PC gamers found themselves playing with their friends on game consoles far more than on their PCs. Consequently PC gaming became an afterthought for developers more often than not. So in becoming more like PCs video game consoles ended up cannibalizing the PC game market.

Many gamers and industry people have remarked about the unusual length of this generation. The 360 is going to be 7 years old this November and both Microsoft and Sony have only just recently been indicating their interest in developing their next systems. With the launch of the Wii U next year as a starting point for the next gen, this current generation will have spanned 8 years! Far longer than many previous generations. It’s likely that the coming generation of video game consoles could end up being even longer, maybe even 10 years. Why? Perhaps because it’s becoming more time consuming and costly to create triple A games. Perhaps because many gamers have found the graphics in their games “good enough” by and large. But whatever the reason, in 2020 what will the video game market look like? What will PC’s be like? Will there even be traditional PCs or will there just be smart devices that you plug into a monitor, keyboard, and mouse? These are questions I love thinking about.

But what does all this mean for the next generation of video game consoles and the future of game consoles in general? Hard to say, but one possibility is as the technology continues to become more powerful and less expensive and development of high budget, high fidelity games becomes more expensive and time consuming and middleware becomes so standardized that we’ll reach a point of platform agnosticism. What I mean by that is that in a decade or so we could very well reach a point where the hardware is so powerful and affordable that it’s irrelevant. A point where the overwhelming majority of games that are produced will run fine on whatever cheap device is available, whether it’s a smart TV or a tablet or a phone or some nettop box. In this hypothetical future very few super high budget games that really push the tech are produced (but a great deal of games that still look better than the best looking games of today are produced) and tons of middle budget and lower budget games are made. And all these games are digitally downloaded on online marketplaces. And many of these games can run on any hardware through emulation layers if they’re not already natively coded for them.

If that hypothetical future becomes a reality, this coming console generation could be the last. The very idea of a “gaming console” would be antiquated.

Comments (8)

Very well said

You make some good, well-thought points. I don't think we'll ever see a 'last' generation - technology will expand, as it always does. But there's something in important and critical when you noted that this generation has been longer than anything else. Personally, I suspect that's where the industry is heading - I think we'll see a PS5 and whatever else, but subsequent generations will continue to have increasingly long life cycles.

And gaming consoles will - they already are - continue to evolve into all-in-one media centers.

I think it's an evolution

In this generation the PS3 and Xbox made attempts to become media hubs as opposed to just game systems. I think in the future you'll see even more of that. Previous generation machines could play games and that's pretty much it. Now you can surf the web, use Netflix, play movies from your personal collection, view movies and videos, etc... Essentially these are becoming machines that we also play games on.

PC gaming will never die, but it won't dominate. There is simply too much dependence on constantly upgrading machines. PC gaming is far more expensive and the console market guarantees that all users will be using the same hardware - which is the complete opposite case on the PC platform.

It'll be interesting, but I think that since graphics are starting to level out - graphical leaps are no longer as impressive as they used to be - you'll see prolonged life of the generations.

I think like Lazarus1209 plus also...

Consoles are already playing as a media hub and that trend will continue. It will help define them more with that content that they have. It also adds new potential revenue streams outside of video games. As a whole, I don't think any devices will effect consoles. I just think it will effect handhelds. Besides, content is everything. They don't have major studios backing up their games like Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft have with their huge portfolios of exclusive titles. They can always leverage them with a console release and they are backed by millions of fans.

I also want to say that people need to realize that graphics are not the only asset you obtain with a powerful system. It is good to gain better A.I., and better loading speeds. There is a lot more potential and it will be taken advantage of and the idea of these consoles being the last...one of those 3 would love if the other two didn't do so. That would give the whole market to them alone with the expection of PCs. Nobody is going to suddenly stop making graphics cards for PCs.

You have an interesting perspective and its cool to see where people think things can go.